Bill Murray, better rhapsodist than singer at the Liceu

BarcelonaOverall pleasant and relaxed, the performance at the Liceu by American actor Bill Murray and the trio of German cellist Jan Vogler had a couple of extraordinary moments, curiously the less comedy there was. One of them allowed us to see Murray's interpretive depth. It was at the beginning of this show, entitled New worlds and which combines literary readings with musical pieces by Ravel, Piazzolla, Gershwin, Shostakovich and Bernstein, among others. All of this is a project resulting from the friendship between Murray and Vogler, artistic director of the Dresden Music Festival and promoter, along with director Kent Nagano, of the historicist interpretation of Wagner's tetralogy.

The actor, at the lectern, read a chapter of Paris was a party, by Ernest Hemingway; specifically, the one that describes the American writer's encounter with the Bulgarian painter Jules Pascin and two model sisters at the Café du Dôme in Montparnasse. Murray provided the voices of the four characters, conveying the joy, sordidness, and pain of the scene, narrated with the awareness of Pascin's suicide. Vogler, the Venezuelan pianist Vanessa Perez, and the Chinese violinist Mira Wang followed the reading in silence, the same silence with which Murray, hidden behind the piano, had previously listened to the second movement of the Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2 by Ravel, and then a remarkable interpretation of The death of the angel by Astor Piazzolla. The melancholic and even elegiac tone dominated the first part of the show, the best, with two other peaks of poetic emotion: the readings of Song of an open road by Walt Whitman and a poem about forgetting by Billy Collins.

A better rhapsodist than a singer, Murray sang with more sorrow than glory. It isn't necessarily so, from the opera Porgy & Bess by George Gershwin. He also made the audience sing, which only filled the Liceu's stalls. There was a desire to smile and applaud, and the recital entered another phase, with jokes about the effect of alcohol on pianists in connection with The piano has been drinking (not me), by Tom Waits, and a tone of moderate comedy. Murray danced as best he could to the wonderful Oblivion Piazzolla's with the violinist, and then emulated Van Morrison with sufficient dignity in When will and ever learn to live in god. Yes, Vogler did shine with theallegro of the Cello Sonata in D minor by Shostakovich and accompanying with Schubert the reading of a fragment of the novel The Deer Hunter, by James Fenimore Cooper. Why Schubert and Cooper? As Murray recalled, the Austrian composer was an admirer of the novels by the author of The Last of the Mohicans.

The ritual dance of fire, by Falla, opened a final section starring West Side Story, by Leonard Bernstein, with mixed results: better when Murray put more intention into some verses (especially those of America, where the dialogue between violin and cello also shone especially), more delicate when he sang SomewhereWith the public's favor in their pocket, rewarded with sympathy, the encores included the song The way it is, by Bruce Hornsby, and Vogler had the detail of paying tribute to Pau Casals with The song of the birds to close an hour and a half of an unpretentious show.